Alternative Headline: Sturgeon’s Law Continues to Exist

Basically, you’re just looking for PC game stores that carry free games other than Steam, right? In that case, Itch.io is the main place to look. Beyond that, games will primarily be distributed on their developer or publisher’s website. Piracy probably won’t be an easy option, as people aren’t going to put in the work creating/uploading pirate copies of a game thats easily available otherwise.

Edit: Also, I think you may be able to use SteamCMD (Steam’s non-launcher, CLI tool) to download the game if its DRM free.

Something like this in SteamCMD:

csgo is a notoriously cpu-bound game. i hear ark is as well.

I don’t know about Ark, but CS2 fixed the overreliance on CPU with the new engine, so its more evenly balanced between CPU and GPU. Notably, it also wouldn’t really make sense for it to be a consistent 80% limit, so its something about the OS or the hardware rather than anything game-specific.

My rarest achievement is for getting 32 silenced revolver kills in Red Orchestra 2 (0.3% of players). Technically its not too difficult, but since its a shooter with a fairly low TTK, you don’t normally use the sidearm much. Further the silenced revolver is a pristige varient that has to be ground out using the original revolver, and performs worse than the unsilenced, so there is no reason to get the achievement except for completionism sake.

The achievement I’m much more proud of is Crypt of the Necromancer’s Vow Down, for completing a full roguelike run with Monk. The gimmick with Monk is that the game is its normal roguelike-on-a-beat, but if you touch any gold, be it an enemy’s drops or dungeon loot, you die instantly 100 to 0. This means that as well as the normal difficulty of the game, you have to plan around where you kill enemies to ensure that you always leave a safe path. I’m pretty confident that this is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in a game. Technically 0.7% of player have the achievement, but given that 0.3% also have the achievement for completing the impossible New Game++++++++ character, we can effectively call it as 0.4% of players.

But like, they can already do that with exclusivity deals if its just for games, nonetheless bad looking ones. The only way this would benefit them is if they genuinely think this actually looks good, or they’re trying to further inflate the AI bubble, and one of those two options seems far more likely than the other.

But like, they can already do that with exclusivity deals. This tech just adds extra overhead to that.

I mean, given that they previously said it was only running on multi-gpu systems, I can’t see one generation of advancement being enough to make this feasible on consumer hardware. At this point, I’m thinking that this is just a paper product meant to help inflate valuations without any intention to launch it.

Maybe there is eventually a way of making these filters look good by adding (many) additional parameters, but they’re still ignoring the much more important question: how are they going to get this to run on anything other than the compute server they’re currently using.

While support for restrictions on social media use is widespread, what people want is far different from what governments are implementating. For example, while a large majority support restrictions, a similarly large majority also believe said restrictions should be managed by parents. (Angus Reid, 2026) At a more practical level, these polls are also extremely vague about the restrictions, and I expect would receive very different results if the questions were about the policies governments are actually trying to implement. Having an “Are you over 18?” popup is still an age gate, but is a very, very different measure than the ID verification most governments want.

With Google, wasn’t the issue that they were on other devices, or were paying others to use their defaults or something? To be clear, I’m working from memory here, and am too tired to read a bunch of legal stuff to confirm one way or the other.

You can’t have a platform dictate everything about how it sells merchant wise without having an antitrust involved.

Didn’t the EU, who have some of the strictest rules in that regard, rule that walled garden ecosystems are allowed in their case against Apple?

Given how big my library is and the fact that I rarely buy full-price, its hard to pick a single item.

If I had to pick one worst, it would probably be Company of Heroes 3. I was really hopeful for the game, and got it bundled with my CPU when building a new PC, but its just not very good. The campaign, the main part I was interested in, is slow and samey and uninteresting. The multiplayer is even worse, being riddled with microtransactions, lootboxes, and other such stuff in ways that significantly impact gameplay, in a supposedly competitive PvP game. Even if we assume the game was equivalent to $20, I only put in four hours, and didn’t enjoy any of it.

In terms of best, the most technically correct would probably be Counter Strike GO/2. I’ve spent about $100 on it, between initial price, battle passes, and skins on the market, but selling those skins has earned me about $140 in revenue, so at 2000 hours, thats negative 2 cents an hour.

Excluding revenue made, its going to be Minecraft by a country mile. I’ve easily put in 10,000 hours since when I started playing mid-beta, so pessimisticly, it’d be around a quarter cent per hour. Honourable, more reasonable mentions would go to Gmod, where it works out to about 1 cent per hour when including time in the editor, and Dota and War Thunder, which are free, but I’ve spent thousands of hours in each and so bought about 2 cents per hour of microtransactions.

$1049 USD for the base model, and even more ludicrous, $1500 CAD.

Ouch. Not unexpected in the current market - not even really overpriced relative to the competition, but still… ouch.

and is stronger than ever

Arguing semantics here, but this is a bit of a stretch. Iran has suffered very significant damage. A more accurate assessment would be that it withstood the US’s onslaught without having their military or their government broken, and have exposed the US military as being too inept to properly wage war.

The takeaway is similar in the context of the war, but its the US that has fallen rather than Iran having risen, which has much more significant global implications.

This kind of “I am immune to snakebite because of my religion” thing has a history of getting people killed.

Was this a case of overreliance on faith? Seems to me more likely that its just that the idea that a snake could bite him and it will hurt that is too complex for him to understand.